Sarah Smith
In 1976 my mother read in The Chicago Tribune : "Train Crash... caused by motorman with marijuana bags." The downtown El had jumped its tracks and landed in the loop, right near Eddie Bauer's plaid flannel. Some passengers had crawled through the cracked windows; others were pinned inside by plastic seats. The train was olive and oily and dirty yellow, keeled over on the sidewalk, a caterpillar dropped from a tree. The injured passengers had revolved, galumph, into gilt-doored stores: the women tried on crepe de chine, the men wanting snowshoes. There was blood on their thighs, glass pinned to them. The train had backed into another train, and some of the passengers had died; some of the pedestrians had died, cars crashing down on them.
"Have you died?" my mother had asked my brother over the phone; he rode that route nearly every day. "Twelve killed, young lady," my mother said to me in the kitchen, looking at the newspaper. "Take this as a sign. For once your brother stopped for lunch, and this saved him."
"Accident due to 'man failure'" they said in the paper.
"Mother," I said.
My mother didn't like my eating habits. My brother was proof that food in the middle of the day could save a life. After his morning law classes at John Marshall, my brother stopped off for food, roast beef and beer. Otherwise, he would have boarded the train that smashed, my mother claimed.
My brother road the Douglas train and never the Lake Dan Ryan. I found this out later, when I moved to Chicago myself. My mother told me that if I picked the pimple on my nose I might die in the night. Sometimes I listened to my mother. Sometimes I didn't.
My brother represented the establishment and making money which I had so far avoided. I was getting mad about this. My father wasn't a CEO or president of a pork company so the money didn't grow on trees. I grew up in the country and we had crabapple, and chokecherry.
Molars and incisors splattered the sidewalks, hair, bloody flesh like bits of flag, the shapes of women's breasts beneath cotton and brilliant yellow gauze. It had been summer and I smelled the sidewalk, the sour blood mixed with diesel and the stone-shoe of asphalt. Women's breasts have the spot of God upon them. Breasts are ordained creatures and I am lucky to have one. It is too bad cancer is getting so many. The padded implants are leaking. These women have silicone in their blood now. Maybe soon they will be turning stiff.
"Mom died today" or "Dad died today" or "Guess what happened to you know who?" phones all over the city said. What a mess on Wabash. What a nuisance, the storekeepers said.
"Life is a little messy," my mother said, when she was in a good mood and feeling all right. She liked thunderstorms, the wind off the lake. She liked it when the wind shook the leaves. She breathed in the cooled air, the world turned the gray blue color of her eyes. "This sends me" she'd say.
"You drive me bats," she told me, sometimes.
Every day for a year now I have ridden the Congress train into the royal blue subway station. It feels like riding into a haunted house; sometimes the horror rises in me, I fear I'm going the wrong way. I'm on the wrong train. "Help," I nearly yell to the attendant in his navy blue polyester uniform. He has radios and Walkie Talkies belted around his waist and a good map in his mind, a calm black face. I swallow my fear. The tunnel's walls are black and lined with fluorescent lights like the blank spaces in connect-the-dot books. The train's wheels squeal; they are squealing hobgoblins, contorted chatterers.
A woman in the handicapped seats, saddlebagged with five coats, hoos gently into a harmonica; the chords are the texture of straw and hay with bits of dried leaf in them. "Please, ma'am," the conductor says to her, "You can toot on the platform. Why don't you get off at Jackson, lady? You can make change playing in the tunnel there, lady."
These days I see everything in terms of money: How much I can save.
How much will I get for these dollars? Why is music so cheap, sometimes,
and sometimes so whiny and bad? The musicians turn on their boom boxes:
their voices sag to the concrete, flat and dragging at my ears. I have to
cover them, my ear lobes sinking, my mouth awry.
I have finally read Anna Karenina. On days when I have waited
too long on the platform, I am falling gracefully in between the green "B's"
wheels and those anvil-shaped bars of the track. I wait for the red "A"
and the "B" comes, two glow-worm eyes in the black hole, yellow
eyes close together and stupid. I stand near the chasm. The silver cars
come and the crowd shudders from the wind. The wind will collect me and
drag me beneath the wheels heavy like the rusted shoes of horses, if I am
not careful. If I stand too close. How easy to stand too close, to tilt
my short waist over the edge of the platform. Will someone push me? This
fall will not be graceful. Anna died gracefully, "her head unhurt dropping
back with its weight of hair," her eyes "still open." On
her knees, "She would rise again at once." She would rise with
her head unhurt, her eyes that stared.
I am listening to the trains. Faraway and through the tunnel she is
the sea in a conch, the ocean far away, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Above,
on the streets you hear her through the grates; the hot wind sifts around
your calves and then the odd metallic chugging chugging huffing. Howard's
subway tunnels resemble strobe-lighted miner's caves, the lights down the
tracks like movie camera lights.
When I board the train sometimes I cannot sit down. Too many people are riding. I lean by the door and watch how the ground fast-fowards below me. The cars rock, the people flopping like rag dolls. You have to hold on tight to the poles. I watch the gravel and the dented cans passing below the floors of these cars. The gravel is so close and whirling, a kaleidoscope, and there by a dumpster is a broken book, the black-lettered pages flung open. Rain will get the words. Trainmen in orange and yellow life-vests have built fires with sticks beside the tracks. The men are strangely affable and open-faced. They rub their hands together. They cannot stop working.
Most days I ride the train to the Ptomaine Palace where I make the soup and fish and hostess on slow days because I can arrange the setting properly; I can carry twenty-five glasses, 200 plates and twelve cups on my arms. I was a Denny's Girl. Later I ride to my psychiatrist's on Erie. This man charges me ten dollars less than the others because he knows I am broke. I am wondering what I will buy with those 10 dollars. The money will soon accumulate to pay him again.
"What do you want from me?" he asked me, when I called him out of the blue. "Are you depressed, or what?"
His voice had the high strings of a guitar, "B" and "E," the tenor of England. He didn't sound like the Beatles, or Prince Charles. Boy George, maybe. Maybe he was from Australia.
Every day I look for Him. The men who see me know I am looking for Him, and wonder if they can pretend for a good time. Some look at me as if they imagine themselves to be Him, Jesus or My God in an overcoat, or maybe just a Grimms Prince. They carry briefcases filled with tales of accounts, pictures of their families in their wallets, little Danny with the dark hair and the swimmy little mouth, dressed in red-animal printed overalls. The princes have a hard time. I am not magic.
Everywhere I see overcoats, I see a city of overcoats. I like black and forest green is nice, too, the men like Robin Hoods carrying the woods about with them, London Fog and Burberrys which now has a perfume. I could buy a whole month's rent with one Burberry.
Sometimes men follow me. They drive red Mercedes, the front license plate lopsided. They park their white Saabs in front of Friday's, and lean beneath the red awning. They wear Ray Bans and size me up as I come bowlegged down the sidewalk.
They park their gun-gray limos by the golf course, and watch as I walk to the El. They come to see me play tennis, and lean on their sticks beside their vans, and watch my awkward serve. My imagination's run wild, I think.
One cloudy afternoon I rode the El to Chicago and State; I wrote a check for 425 dollars and became a passive member of Dr. W's Into-date Matchmakers Graduate Professional Society. Being a passive member allows men likewise in the program to finger the photographs Dr. W. took of me with a soft-focus lens. They read her notes about me and the forms I filled out. I completed dozens of sentences on the questionnaires: I am marvelously, Happiness is, a Sun day, I am into witchery and green choo choo trains. I completed them all but avoided describing my feelings, which I was not supposed to do.
"You never do what I tell you to do," my mother always said.
I told Dr. W that, although I am not prejudiced and was last seen head over heels for a black African, I would like to marry a caucasian. This has to do with archetypes, I said. "Be open," she said. "You can't lose. We have some nice men from Columbia and Bolivia in our program--you'll get more dates if you're open, since you're a passive member," she said. "More men will look at you."
Naturally, I would like to be active, too. Then I would do the looking. But for the cost of being active, I could buy a Burberry.
I look at the men on the streets, anyhow, men in overcoats, and women whom I don't like much. They are vice presidents of banks and have had a pedicure, like dogs, and I? I am a teller of sorts.
Men have swell eyes. And mouths like ocean creatures. Hair like weeds with the sun on them, shiny as shells. I have wires in my red hair now. They are stiff as whips and startle me when I look into the mirror, which I have to do often, to recall what I happen to look like.
Although I have green eyes, the whites of my eyes are blue, like the insides of clam shells, or abalone. As if a little of my mother's blue irises tinged my whites. When I am mad my mouth becomes a banshee's, lines, and my eyes flash like the insides of lightbulbs, as if I am cracking.
I am losing parts of me, like my breast.
Why is there no "Our Mother"?
Pupils are perfectly round, drops of coal and earth. Some men have shrunken pupils, the smallest dots. The dots look as though they'll swirl off somewhere. These men pull their chairs up close to me, with a scoot of wheels. I have my own wheels.
My psychiatrist is the love of my life. Perhaps all I've ever wanted is a world of fathers. "You like things idyllic," he tells me, when I tilt my head and look into the watercolor on his wall, the painting a thin-slatted barn in a wheat field. The barn's windows are small, only so welcoming. The house on the right is the color of orange brick dust. Fine lines of orange and royal blue and yellow green carve the trees. The wheat field seems lower than the buildings behind it, as if the land were reaching out to me, out of the wall. The picture looks different whenever I see it.
"Would you like to be in my picture?" he asks.
"Which one?" I ask.
"I have many pictures, which one do you want?"
"I like that one best," I say, meaning the one I look into.
"I do too," he says. This surprises me.
He has a weird green and black Picasso, a charcoal drawing of lean horses and wagons disappearing down a dirt road, another modern full of lines and orange jags, an oil rig pumping in the desert. Beside his chair hangs the wall of a brownstone; the canvas is blotchy, the paint thick and elevated.
"The barns are always bigger than the houses," he says.
"What kind of a barn is it?" I ask. There are all kinds of barns. The eves of some barns swoop low to the earth, some folks build round barns. I fold my coat and smooth it over and over in my hands. "When you were a child did you have a security blanket?" he asks, "a teddy bear?" "No," I say. "I had cats." He doesn't reply. He is falling asleep. I turn to the picture. He has propped his feet on the black coffee table, and he has on short argyle socks. My father wears Supphose. He jerks in his chair and one eyelid lifts slightly behind his black-framed glasses. He is not really asleep. He has grey eyelashes and thick, wavy yellow-white hair. In his 60's, he has more hair than my brother.
"You're mourning, you know," he tells me, his eyes wide open. "Do you know that? Look at your hands."
I hold my coat, and fold and unfold the gray tweed in my hands, smooth the torn lining, twist and touch it and lay it on my knees. "Unbelievable," he says. "Look at how you're sitting. You're ready to roll right out the door. You're all curled up."
Since my mother died, I've found myself picking up the phone to dial her, as I did in college. "Hi Mom. Is the dogwood out? the crabapple? What about the wild iris? Has the blue heron come around? Did you spot him with your opera glasses? Are you feeding the yellow finches? Look, Mom. Look at me. Look, look here I am. I'm in Chicago. Can you believe that! Look at me, Mom. Are you laughing your ringing loud laugh? Let's go for a drive out to St. Charles, or we could ride the El and visit Kathleen, you remember Kathleen. All those summers and the tree forts we built. You made us tear them down. You'll kill the trees, you said.
I want to ask my father if my mother ever visited Montana, New Mexico, New York--how about Coney Island, Dad? Did she ever see Luna Park, queenly Russian and lighted? Did she, perhaps, witness Topsy's electric execution, the famous elephant maddened, become killer when some ass fed her a "burning cigarette," her carcass fallen over, fuming, burnt up by Thomas Edison himself? Nothing, apparently, would kill her but his current, as Smithsonian says, not even carrots "laced with poison." Did Mom play IT like Clara Bow?
No. What did she see, did she do?
Remember?
My father sends me letters, now and then. It is spring and he and his new wife are raking the leaves in our large yard. He is replanting a garden by the barnyard fence, yellow tomatoes and rhubarb, curly-edged lettuce, and beets; my mother loved those greens. Even when he stops caring for his gardens, the yellow tomatoes grow without his help. The squash spreads its broad leaves around the barnyard.
Sometimes at night I hear my mother's upright piano banging, not at all musical. "You practice right now, young lady." I never could play; my fingers are clumsy. The chords I hear are sour, the yellow of curdled milk, brittle as stalks of oat straw, meaningless as wind in dry grass. I suppose.
I ride the El in the morning. The ground goes by like a rope slung beside me. I blink awake my blue abalone eyes, the train chugging the thick fog from me. The woman across from me wears suede Clark shoes and your yellow parka. I have not stopped looking for you around the corners. You never rode this train. Oh, Mother, how is it that you have thrown me, and thrown me, and thrown me?